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Sometimes you want to send an enormous amount of data to the client, much
more than you want to keep in memory. When you are generating the data on
the fly though, how do you send that back to the client without the
roundtrip to the filesystem?

This is a basic view function that generates a lot of CSV data on the fly.
The trick is to have an inner function that uses a generator to generate
data and to then invoke that function and pass it to a response object:

Each yield expression is directly sent to the browser. Note though
that some WSGI middlewares might break streaming, so be careful there in
debug environments with profilers and other things you might have enabled.

The trick here is to get the template object from the Jinja2 environment
on the application and to call stream() instead of
render() which returns a stream object instead of a
string. Since we’re bypassing the Flask template render functions and
using the template object itself we have to make sure to update the render
context ourselves by calling update_template_context().
The template is then evaluated as the stream is iterated over. Since each
time you do a yield the server will flush the content to the client you
might want to buffer up a few items in the template which you can do with
rv.enable_buffering(size). 5 is a sane default.

Note that when you stream data, the request context is already gone the
moment the function executes. Flask 0.9 provides you with a helper that
can keep the request context around during the execution of the
generator: